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MoneyLab #5: Matters of CurrencyUniversity at Buffalo, New York

27–28 April 2018

It is no longer clear how the axiom “money is power” still holds—if it ever did—in an era of cryptocurrencies, local currencies, free trade zones as financial instruments, “cheap nature” and resource extraction, offshore tax havens, and their leaks in things like the paradise papers. The terms “making” and “money” both mutate with their globally distributed technological, financial and legal frameworks now independent of national regulations.

Common to and between all these mutations, a new relationship to the physicality of money appears: what is the matter and materiality of money? What is the current physicality of value? Currency and matter both resonate with multiple significations today, and invoke the need to examine the “making of money” from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This symposium brings together a range of voices contributing to possible answers for these questions, from fields including Philosophy, Art, Architecture, Computer Science, Community Activism and more. Participants will variously examine different forms of money—objects, life and spaces—for their physicalities, or matters.

Through workshops, talks and panel discussions, “Matters of Currency” will shed new light on money- power relations as mirrored in changing relations to technological and material transformations in the world today.